The right benchmark for notepad++ is not visual studio. It's notepad2.

Notepad2 = 1792 kB.

P.S. Pay attention, this is kilobytes, not bytes :D

But it's impossible to do a real apples-to-apples comparison, because I use Atom more like an IDE than I ever did with notepad++, and Atom has magnitudes more features for me than notepad++ ever did and most likely ever will.

I don't care about the difference of 175mb of ram between the 2 as one of them (atom) is infinitely more useful for me than the other (notepad++)